The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis: review

Sometimes, we have the retrospective feeling that our lives change in the course of a summer. Occasionally, we have the authentic sensation that the change in our lives coincides with a larger change – in society, in the way we all relate to each other. A change like this surely happened around 1970, in the ways that men and women treated each other – were permitted, were obliged to treat each other.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

Martin Amis’s sumptuous new novel has as its central image a group of young people around a pool in Italy. They are mostly unconnected, except by custom and friendship. They gaze into and across the pool, at themselves and at each other, glimpsing both the truth about themselves and what they are metamorphosing into. The myth of Narcissus runs, half-glimpsed, through the story.

In the summer of 1970, Keith Nearing is spending the summer with his on-off girlfriend Lily at her rich friend Scheherazade’s family castle in Italy. It belongs to her uncle Jorquil, whose disgraced gold-digging girlfriend Gloria Beautyman is about to arrive. Keith and Lily are second-best; when the girls go into town, the local youth “fall like noisy soldiery into loose formation… and when did you ever see that? A crowd of men, walking backwards?” But they are gawping at Scheherazade, the giant blonde, and in bed at night, Lily resignedly accedes to Keith’s hopeless desire for her friend.

In the sexual revolution, some of these characters are doing better than others: some, clearly, are going to emerge unscathed and others will not get out alive in the half-formed new world. As Alexander Herzen says: “The departing world leaves behind not an heir, but a pregnant widow.” There is a parade of vivid and truthful figures who drift through the Italian summer, some staying a night or two, others coming and going for months. There is the local count, Adriano, good-looking and perfectly made, a man of action who would do very well for Scheherazade but for one thing. He is 4ft 10in and hilariously accident-prone – “And we were just taking our seats for Parsifal when the balcony collapsed.” The worst of Keith’s friends, Kenrik, arrives, along with his companion, Rita, board-thin and possessed of almost too much sexual confidence. Scheherazade’s boyfriend, Timmy, moronically thick at everything but music, chess and maths, turns up after failing to convert the Jews of Jerusalem.

The cavalcade of walk-on parts is beautifully done, offering a constant supply of thoughtful hilarity. Amis’s cunning is at its peak in not announcing the main source of Keith’s sexual trauma, or his eventual cure, in a portentous way; both of them sidle in quietly and their mammoth impact is, as it was for Keith, retrospective. Most of all, there is Keith’s younger sister, Violet, whose bad behaviour is reported in pained letters from London by Keith’s brother, Nicholas; we will hear a lot about her, but her heartbreaking entry in person is reserved for the last pages of the novel and she will turn out to be what the novel, really, is about.

Comedy is tragedy, if you will only look deeply enough. A hero called Keith will awake some expectations from Amis’s regular readers. There was a period when no novel of his lacked a grotesque Keith – darts moron Keith Talent in London Fields, a Keith blowing his poetic talent in The Information, another blowing tens of thousands on lunch in Money. Dead Babies had, like this novel, a Keith as the least dignified member of a house party, the butt of everyone’s scorn and contempt.

But this Keith is a human being and the impossibility of his getting together with Scheherazade, based only on the discord of their names, is only the beginning of the novelist’s investigation. By the end, Keith’s history may be authentically moistening your eyes; it seems like an act of reparation to all those earlier grotesques. I was struck by how systematically The Pregnant Widow alludes to pretty well every previous one of Amis’s novels at some point – London Fields’s Lizzyboo, Charles Highway “reading Sex at Oxford”, Other People’s Heidi, a friend, here, of Violet, even Odilo Unverdorben’s “Ich”, stuck in the throat. Beyond that, there are graceful nods to Amis’s father – when someone says they read something “in an English novel”, it is in one of Kingsley's – and, with huge comedy, Keith is spending his entire summer reading through the English novel, understanding it in his own way. “Anyway, it’s a happy ending,” they reflect on Pride and Prejudice. “Except for that slag who f---- the dragoon.”

Life, Keith reflects, “was a Russian novel. One month ago, it was an American novel. And now… it’s only an English novel of about 1970, concerning itself with the ups and downs of the middle classes, and never any longer than 225 pages.” The interaction of human lives and the projections of fiction have long been a concern of Amis’s. Here, we always feel that these are real people, often trying to inhabit roles they have constructed for themselves, or perhaps just read about, and their failures are genuinely painful. There is a half page in which a couple, on their way home, agree their relationship is at the end and torment each other with unforgettable, lancing accuracy, wounding and insulting other people without much care. It’s difficult to explain the sense that characters possess a life and a reality you could walk around. But again and again, reading about Gloria, Kenrik, or even absurd little Adriano, one feels that here are the real people behind the cartoon whores, the sordid crooks and dwarfs of Amis’s early fiction. They were wonderful in their own way, and this is wonderful in its.

Moving and humane, The Pregnant Widow also captivates by the accustomed wit and elegance of its style. Amis just writes so well and so freshly. Whether it is Gloria announcing that “My arse is too big. I just can’t get it all in a tutu”, or Timmy’s entrance, “limply stylish, like a doodle from a talented hand”, or Adriano, descending from the sky in a helicopter “like a furious asterisk”, Amis is consistently bold, visual and accurate. And the writing is always apt to inflate the remotest parts of the novel with observed life – Keith’s infant daughter, in later life, the merest walk-on part, telling him about “a swimming pool so deep that even the grown-ups had to wear floaties”. And, for the first time, I think, there is committed and evocative writing about nature from this most urban of novelists – you feel that Amis is not just stretching himself but surprising himself when he watches a bee, a fly, a mountain range and finds words for it.

The novel is about sexual relations and what happened to women when society decided to treat them in a certain way. The sexist comedy around the poolside is always undercut with closely observed pain – poor Pansy, who feels obliged to join in against her will, and Lily, who will take her revenge, or little Conchita, who suffers worst of all, in one of the novel’s most painful revelations. When Gloria says, “In the future every girl will be like me. I’m just ahead of my time,” we think of the victims, too; and when we hear, late on, what Violet does with the builders – “‘But there were lots of builders.’ ‘I know’” – laughter is quickly damped down. If in the past, Amis has assured us that he loves women, this novel proves it.

I love this novel and it warmed when I read it a second time. It is beautifully achieved, cunningly relaxed, and reveals considerable emotional depth in its last pages. It is not quite perfect and doesn’t want to be – I think, when Amis was contemplating a summer that would contain the seeds of the modern world, he yielded to a temptation to push some Islamic themes which sit somewhat awkwardly with the rest of the argument. But for the rest of it, the novel is a work for which the term “return to form” hardly seems enough; it is a revisiting of past sins, seen with the eyes not just of maturity, but of the momento mori. The Man Booker Prize would be no more than its due.